History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 82

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co.
Number of Pages: 666

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Dr. John P. Harrison was born in Louisville, Kentucky, June 5, 1796. He began the study of medicine in that city, but the principal part of his pupilage was spent in the office of Professor Chapman, in Philadelphia. He graduated in the Medical Department of the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania in 1819, and began immediately the practice of his profession in his native city. There he remained sixteen years. Much of this time he was physician to the Marine Hospital. In 1835 he removed to Philadelphia, but having received the appointment of Professor in the Cincinnati College, he came the same year to this city. He remained in that school until it suspended in 1839. In 1841 he was elected Professor of Materia Medica in the Medical College of Ohio. In 1847 he was transferred to the Chair of Practice, but after two ses- sions, in 1849, at his own request, he was restored to his former Chair. This position he held at the time of his death. He was President of the Medical Convention of Ohio in 1843, Chairman of the Committee on Medical Literature in the American Medical Association in Balti- more in 1848, and Vice-President of the same body at Boston in 1849. During his connection with the Cincinnati College he was one of the editors of the Western Journal of Medicine. In 1847 he became one of the editors of the Western Lancet.

His more important works were Essays and Lectures on Medical Subjects, and his work on Materia Medica, in two volumes, published in 1845. He died of cholera, in this city, September 1, 1849, aged fifty-three. He fell like a soldier in the line of duty, with his face to the foe.

Of his successor I can find but the following note, taken from the Medical News and Library, October, 1872:

"There died in this city, August 19th, at the mature age of seventy- two years, Dr. John Bell. Dr. Bell is well-known as a contributor to medical literature. He is the author of a work on Baths and Mineral Waters, which has gone through several editions. He edited, with ad- ditions, Stokes' Trcatise on the Practice of Physic, Combe's Treatise on the Physical and Moral Management of Infancy, etc., and contrib- uted very many papers to different periodicals, and reports to societies. He lectured for several years in the Phiadelphia Medical Institute, and occupied for one session the Chair of Theory and Practice in the Ohio Medical College. For several years his health had been declining and had incapacitated him from active professional duties."

Samuel G. Armor, M.D., now of Brooklyn, New York, was born January 29, 1818, in Washington county, Pennsylvania, of Scotch-Irish parentage. While young his parents removed to Ohio. He received his collegiate education at Franklin college, New Athens, Ohio, and the degree of LL.D. was conferred on him in the same institution at its commencement in June, 1872. He studied medicine with Dr. James S. Troine, of Millersburgh, Ohio, and graduated in the Missouri Medical college of St. Louis in 1844. Soon after his graduation he located in Rockport, Illinois. In · 1847 he accepted an invitation to deliver a

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HISTORY OF CINCINNATI, OHIO.

special course of lectures on physiology in the Rush Medical college of Chicago, Illinois, and the following year he was tendered the chair of physiology and pathology in the same institution, which he declined for the reason that he had just accepted the same chair in the medical de- partment of the Iowa university, located at Keokuk, Iowa. He sub- sequently resigned his chair in this institution, and accepted the chair of the natural sciences in the Cleveland university, in the meantime de- voting himself to the general practice of his profession. In July, 1853, the Ohio State Medical society awarded to Dr. Armor a prize for his essay upon the Zymotic Theory of the Essential Fevers, and during the same year he resigned the chair of the natural sciences in the Cleveland university and accepted the chair of physiology and pathology in the Medical College of Ohio. During the following year he was transferred to the chair of pathology and practice of medicine and clinical medi- cine, made vacant by the resignation of Professor L. M. Lawson, which chair he continued to fill during his connection with the school. In May, 1855, Dr. Armor was married to Mary M. Holcomb, of Dayton, Ohio, and soon after resigned his position in the Medical College of Chio and transferred his residence to that city. Immediately after his resignation in the Medical College of Ohio he was elected to the chair of pathology and clinical medicine in the Missouri Medical college of St. Louis, of which institution he was an alumnus. In 1861 he was ten- dered the chair of institutes of medicine and materia medica in the University of Michigan, which position he accepted, making his home in Detroit. In 1866, he accepted the chair of therapeutics, materia medica, and general pathology in the Long Island College hospital of Brooklin, New York, and in the following year he was transferred to that of practice of medicine and clinical medicine, made vacant by the resignation of Professor Austin Flint, which position he still occupies. Dr. Armor has been a frequent contributor to the current medical lit- erature of his time.

Leonidas Moreau Lawson was born in Nicholas county, Kentucky, September 12, 1812. He received his early education in what after- wards became Augusta college. In 1830, at the age of eighteen, he received a license to practice medicine in the first medical district of Ohio. He removed soon after to Mason county, Kentucky, where he engaged in practice until 1837, when he attended lectures at 'Transylva- nia university, Lexington, graduating there in the spring of 1838. In 1841 he removed to Cincinnati. In 1842 he founded the Western Lan- cet, and continued its sole editor and proprietor until 1855. In 1844 he commenced to reprint Hope's Pathological Anatomy. During the same year he received a call to a chair in Transylvania university. In 1845 he spent several months in the hospitals of London and Paris. On his return he removed to Lexington, where he delivered two courses of lectures. He edited the Western Lancet in that city while lecturing there. In 1847 he accepted the chair of materia medica and general pathology in the Medical college cf Ohio. This position he held until 1853, when he was appointed professor of the principles and practice of medicine and of clinical medicine. In 1855 he disposed of his interest in the Western Lancet to Dr. Thomas Wood. In 1854 and 1855 he delivered two courses of lectures in the Kentucky School of Medicine, at Louisville, Kentucky. In 1856 he returned to the Medi- cal college of Ohio, where he remained until his death. In 1861 he published his work on Phthisis Pulmonalis, a work to which he had given six years of earnest labor and which was a standard work long after its publication. He died in Cincinnati, January 21, 1864, æt. fifty-one, of the disease whose pathology he had done so much to establish. I was myself at that time a student upon the benches, and well remember the long line of student-mourners who filed out of the college down to the church, and from the church to the grave. The short remnant of his course was filled out by Dr. C. G. Comegys, of this city, at that time professor in the college of the Institutes of Medi- cine, as the chair of physiology was then called.

Dr. James Graham died only a few days ago [October, 1879] at the ripe age of sixty-one, and we have just had opportunity to observe in what veneration he was held in this city and school. Ile entered this college in 1854, and lectured continuously in it for twenty years. He was dean of the college for ten or fifteen years. He was born at New Lisbon, Ohio, in 1818; but very little is known of his early history. He was cducated at Jefferson college, Washington county, Pennsylvania, and graduated in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Phila- delphia. Ile came to us friendless and unknown. Ile raised himself to the highest position that could be reached in medicine, and held it with honor to himself and to his profession for a full quarter of a century, resigning it then, under protest of all his colleagues, because he felt that his day was done. One day in his early youth he stood up in the Medical society and made a report of a case. His report

was sharply criticised, and he defended himself with an ability in singular contrast with his age and experience. A few days afterwards a far-sighted old physician, who was conducting a medical college, came to him and requested him to fill a chair in it. The students in the other schools thought it a joke, and they made up a crowd to go and give him a reception. They went down armed with paper-wads and such other missiles of juvenile aggression. They came pouring in at the door. Dr. Graham was just at his desk, and was stopped by the noise. For a moment he was thoroughly confused, then straighten- ing himself he begged for a few moments' attention. Forthwith he commenced his subject and as, stimulated by the opposition, he con- tinued his lecture, he poured out such a stream of simple eloquence as won every heart. Cheer after cheer went up as he closed. The whole class was won. In a few ycars more he was at the post he held for twenty years in the Medical College of Ohio.

Dr. Graham had been sick so long that the youngest generation of medical men never knew him personally. But they knew of him. The name of no teacher of medicine in this city has ever come down with such a halo about it as that of Dr. Graham. It is the universal testi- mony of students of medicine, who have sat at his feet while he taught, that he had no equal as a lecturer on the practice of medicine. It was not that his vocabulary was so great. On the contrary his words were few, but they were so perfectly clear and choice as to convey, with the greatest force, precisely what he meant to say. Dr. Graham was master in the art of exposition. His style was perfectly simple. He stood straight as an arrow before his class and spoke, at first gently, win- ningly, and then warmly, until his face glowed like a poet's and music fell from his lips. Dr. Graham had but one affectation. He would always pretend, not so much in words as manner, a kind of amusing indifference to the statements of Continental authors; but if there hap- pened to be on the benches a scholar familiar with their works, he soon discovered that they had been ransacked for new points in pathology before the lecture was begun. An inexperienced listener would often wonder at the perfect flow of facts upon such short preparation, or seemingly none at all, but it was well known that Dr. Graham never went before his class without thorough investigation of the best and latest books. Thereupon would follow that lucid exposition of the subject which gave the student a knowledge of disease he eould not learn from books.

But it was as a lecturer in clinical medicine that Dr. Graham stood head and shoulders above others. It was at the bedside rather than at the desk that he forgot himself, and made the student forget himself, in the subject being studied. It was indeed a rare privilege to hear Dr. Graham lecture on a case of heart-disease, so systematically and suc- cinctly could he make a diagnosis, and so clearly and convincingly es- tablish the principles of its treatment. Men who had been abroad and listened to the best clinicians of Europe, would say invariably on their return, "I have never heard the equal of Dr. Graham as a clinical lect- urer." Profounder scholars were abundant, more thorough patholo- gists everywhere, but better clinicians none. Dr. Graham had in his prime a keen insight, a woman's intuition, a fine instinct, which enabled him to fix upon the disease at once, and he had, as only the children of genius have, the gift of making it plair. to the commonest understand- ing. The country students fresh from the plough, and the college graduate fresh from the halls of learning, sat with equal pleasure and profit at his feet. As a physician he was emphatically a "doctor for doctors."

Dr. Graham seldom wrote. Had he written as he tall:cd his death would have been felt as a national loss. He leaves few relatives to mourn him. But there are a thousand men in this State to-day, his pupils in the past, who will feel such grief at the announcement of the death of James Graham as the wider world felt at the death of Charles Dickens.

Robert Bartholow, A. M., M. D., the recently elected professor of materia medica in Jefferson Medical college, was born November 18, 1831, in Howard county, Maryland. He is now, therefore, at forty- eight, in the full maturity of life. We learn from the Biographical Encyclopedia of Ohio that he completed his education at Calvert col- lege, in his native State, and in due course of time received from this institution the degree of master of arts. He began the study of medi- eine immediately upon leaving college, and in the year 1852 graduated from the university of Maryland. He attended subsequent courses of lectures, however, in the years 1855 and 1856. In 1857 he entered the United States army by competitive examination, passing first in his class. lle remained in the army in various eap.icities, at one time hav- ing charge of one of the large hospitals in Washington until 1846, when he resigned to take a position in the faculty of the Medical col-

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lege of Ohio. It was during his army service that the monograph on the enlistment of soldiers was written, a work that still remains official; and it was at this time also that he contributed an instructive series of papers to the sanitary commission and published his work on sperma- torrhœa.

Dr. Bartholow was tendered, immediately upon his entrance into Cincinnati, the only position in the college then vacant, viz., the chair of medical chemistry. This chair had been hitherto filled for the most part by professional chemists rather than physicians, and the appoint- ment of a physician, pur et simple, was regarded rather with disfavor by that large class opposed to innovations. Dr. Bartholow entered upon his new duties with characteristic zeal. He began to teach chem- istry in its application to practical medicine. Instead of inorganic was substituted organic chemistry. The staid and placid sessions of the Academy of Medicine, which had been hitherto occupied in the nar- ratives of the experiences of the older physicians, about as profitable as the "class meetings" of some of the churches, began to be dis- turbed by reports on the analysis of drinking water, of cholera excreta -Dr. Bartholow was at this time put in charge of the Cholera hospital -on sewerage, ventilation, ozone, etc. It was in this chair of chem- istry and in these studies that Dr. Bartholow laid the deep foundations of his education.

In 1869 he was transferred to the chair of Materia Medica, where he commenced the course which has since given him his fame. For his concise work on therapeutics is really simply the condensation of his course of lectures. His lectures were illustrated with experiments ex- hibiting the action of drugs on the lower animals, and his abundant writings at this time display, in every direction, the widest research and the utmost fertility of invention. It was about this time that he wrote his Manual of Hypodermic Medication, his Russell prize essay on Quinia, his American Medical association prize essay on Atropia, and his Fiske prize essay on the Bromides. It is safe to say that he took the prize whenever he contended for it.

With the retirement of Professor Graham in 1874, Dr. Bartholow naturally drifted into the chair of Theory and Practice in the col- lege, which position he has held and upheld to the present time. We can readily imagine that the question of accepting the call to Phila- delphia must have been long and deliberately studied before it was ac" cepted. Dr. Bartholow had by far the largest and most lucrative practice ever attained in Cincinnati, and, what is even dearer to the heart of the true physician, enjoyed in a singular degree the confidence as well as the esteem of his patients. It is safe to say that Dr. Barthol- ow left all these allurements that he might have leisure to prosecute his studies. The Appletons are now publishing for him a large work upon Practice, which will represent the crowning efforts of his profes- sional career.

Personally Dr. Bartholow is a man of average height, substantial build, reserved manner, intensely active, even restless habit. In lecture, narrative, or debate he is singularly cool and calculating. He is choice of word, undemonstrative, incisive. An especial characteristic is his capacity for work. He was at one time pathologist to one hospital, clinician to another, and regular lecturer in the college. He was at the same time editor of The Clinic, the first medical weekly published in the west, was indeed one of the founders of it, was examiner and referee for a life insurance company, was contributor to all the new and many of the old journals, meanwhile attending to the ceaseless and often har- assing demands of a rapidly growing practice. But he was always ready for a new case, a new lecture or course of them, a new debate in the academy, a new paper for a journal, a new chapter in a book. Dr. Bartholow is, in short, the type of a modern physician, and they who know him best, have no doubt of his success wherever he may go or in whatever work he may engage.

With this sketch our record is complete to date. These are their works, and these are the individuals [including Dr. Drake] who succes- sively filled the chair of Practice in the Medical college of Ohio for sixty years, from October 1, 1819, to October 1, 1879. We may safely challenge any other institution or any other branch of learning, in this city or in the west, to show as bright a page of history.

The Medical College of Ohio has now grown to be one of the greatest institutions of the kind in the world. Its Sixtieth Annual Catalogue and Announcement, made for the session of 1880-1, bears the name of ten full pro- fessors in the Faculty of the College, with six assistants and one instructor, two demonstrators and one assistant, and two lecturers, with a catalogue of nearly two thousand

graduates. One hundred and twenty-one-the largest graduating class in the history of the college-were grad- uated at the Commencement of 1880, while the entire number of matriculants for the year was three hundred and twenty-six. The Faculty have exclusive charge of the Good Samaritan hospital, on the southeast corner of Sixth and Lock streets, which is managed by the Sisters of Charity. The students also receive clinical instruction in the College dispensary and in the Cincinnati hospital, to the latter of which the students of all medical colleges in the city are admitted. A new Clinical amphitheatre has been erected in connection with the College, for the students of the Ohio Medical. A liberal system of prizes and hospital appointments also opens superior ad- vantages to the ambitious student. The Public Library, in the immediate vicinity of the College, contains a large medical library, which is open to the students gratui- tously during all library hours.

THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT OF CINCINNATI COLLEGE.

This was organized in 1835, under the charter of the College, giving it full powers to establish such branch. The reasons for its establishment appear, with sufficient fullness for the purposes of this History, in the resolu- tion presented at a meeting of the trustees of the Col- lege, in May of this year, at the instance of Dr. Joshua Martin, a physician of Xenia and mover of the resolu- tion :

WHEREAS, The recent attempts of the medical profession and the General Assembly of Ohio to re-organize and improve the condition of the Medical College of Ohio have, as we are informed, been unsuccess- ful (the Board of Trustees having adjourned sine die, leaving two or three of its professorships vacant); and whereas, there is the utmost danger that Ohio will lose the advantages of a medical institution, unless immediate measures be taken to organize a substitute for said college ;- therefore, be it

Resolved, That this Board will forthwith proceed to establish a Med- ical Department of the Cincinnati College.

The resolution was referred to Trustees Martin, Ephraim Morgan, Albert Picket, Dr. William Mornit, and William R. Morris. Their report thereon was that, "from the peculiar situation in which the Medical Col- lege of Ohio is placed at this time, the interests of the State, and especially of this community, require that this Board should immediately create a Medical Department and appoint a Medical Faculty."

This proved to be the sense of the Board; the De- partment was accordingly formed, and the following- named Faculty announced the next month:

Dr. J. N. McDowell, special and surgical anatomy.

Dr. Samuel D. Gross, general and pathological anatomy, physiology, and medical jurisprudence.

Dr. Horatio G. Jameson, surgery.

Dr. Landon C. Rives, obstetrics, and diseases of women and children.

Dr. James B. Rogers, chemistry and pharmacy.

Dr. John P. Harrison, materia medica.

Dr. Daniel Drake, theory and practice of medicine.

John L. Riddle, M. A., adjunct professor of chemistry.

Three of these were professors from the Faculty of the Medical College, chosen, it would appear, as a measure of policy, in the nature of a hint to the trustees of the Medical college to adopt the new Faculty themselves,

Very Respectfully your Drausie Wulsin

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and thus avoid the alternative of another school of the kind in connection with the Cincinnati college. The hint was not taken, however, and the department was duly opened the next fall. Dr. Jameson did not fulfill his appointment, and the chair was taken by that distin- guished surgeon and scientist, Dr. Willard Parker. After the first session Mr. Riddle vacated his place, and Dr. Cary A. Trimble, afterwards a prominent physician in Chillicothe and a member of congress, was appointed demonstrator in anatomy. The chair filled by Dr. Gross was the first of the kind founded in the United States, and the abilities and reputation of its occupant contrib- uted to give it distinction. The Faculty as a whole was considered a very able one.

The new department at once took respectable rank, and considerably led the older medical college in the at- tendance of students, having eighty the first year and one hundred and twenty-five the next, then standing sec- ond in this particular among the western schools of medicine. Its history was inevitably short, however. Four sessions it lasted, and there was an end. Mr. Mansfield says, in the Life of Dr. Drake:

The cause of the dissolution of the medical department at that time was one which has extinguished the hopes and promise of many literary institutions in this country. It was simply the want of funds to sup- ply the apparatus, library, hospital, and other material means necessary to carry on scientific instruction. The day is gone when any unin- spired man can, by human learning or eloquence, go out into the fields and draw crowds around him, as was once the case in the middle ages, when learning emerged from the tomb of centuries. The world now requires the luxurious arts of instruction, and is no longer willing to receive the lessons of Gamaliel divested of the dross and drapings of his profession. Nor is science any longer the simple and unadorned thing it once was. It comes now not only with man's arts, but with complications and collaterals which require a scientific machinery for adaptation and illustration. In fine, to establish a scientific institution and give instructions in all its parts, requires buildings, apparatus, libraries, and laboratories, which in turn require the investment of large snms of money. The faculty of Cincinnati college undertook to do this for themselves, found it too great a burden and gave it up.

Dr. Gross, who was with the school from the begin- ning almost to the end, adds :

The chief burden fell upon the four original projectors-Drake, Riv- ers, McDowell and myself. They found the edifice of the Cincinnati college, erected many years before, in a state of decay, without appara- tus, lecture-room, or museum; they had to go east of the mountains for two or three professors, with onerous guarantees; and they had to en- counter no ordinary degree of prejudice and actual opposition from the friends of the medical college of Ohio. It is not surprising, therefore, that after struggling on, though with unusually increasing classes and with a spirit of activity and perseverance that hardly knew any bounds, it should at length have exhausted the patience and even the forbear- ance of its founders. What, however, contributed more, perhaps, than anything else to its immediate downfall was the resignation of Dr. Parker, who, in the summer of 1839, accepted the corresponding chair in the college of physicians and surgcons of the city of New York, an institution which he has been so instrumental in elevating, and which he still continues to adorn by his talents and his extraordinary popularity as a teacher and a practitioner. The vacation of the surgical chair was soon followed by my own retirement and by that of my other . colleagues, Dr. Drake being the last to withdraw. The school had cost cach of the original projectors about four thousand dollars, nearly the amount of the emoluments of their respective chairs during its brief but brilliant career.

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History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 82

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co. Number of Pages: 666

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co.
Number of Pages: 666